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Applied Scientist

This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate ranking, noisy sorting, outlier detection, and top-arm identification in bandits. The key novelty of the MaxGap bandit problem is that it aims to adaptively determine the

Algorithms that fuse multiple input sources benefit from both complementary and shared information. Shared information may provide robustness against faulty or noisy inputs, which is indispensable for safety-critical applications like self-driving cars. We investigate learning fusion algorithms that are robust against noise added to a single source. We first demonstrate that robustness against single source

Communication bottleneck has been identified as a significant issue in distributed optimization of large-scale learning models. Recently, several approaches to mitigate this problem have been proposed, including different forms of gradient compression or computing local models and mixing them iteratively. In this paper, we propose Qsparse-local-SGD algorithm, which combines aggressive sparsification with

Understanding the principles of causal inference in the visual system has a long history at least since the seminal studies by Albert Michotte. Many cognitive and machine learning scientists believe that intelligent behavior requires agents to possess causal models of the world. Recent ML algorithms exploit the dependence structure of additive noise terms for inferring causal structures from observational

Applied Scientist

Large-scale distributed training of neural networks is often limited by network bandwidth, wherein the communication time overwhelms the local computation time. Motivated by the success of sketching methods in sub-linear/streaming algorithms, we introduce SKETCHEDSGD, an algorithm for carrying out distributed SGD by communicating sketches instead of full gradients. We show that SKETCHED-SGD has favorable

We propose a variant of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm for solving a class of sparse/low-rank optimization problems. Our formulation includes Elastic Net, regularized SVMs and phase retrieval as special cases. The proposed PrimalDual Block Frank-Wolfe algorithm reduces the per-iteration cost while maintaining linear convergence rate. The per iteration cost of our method depends on the structural complexity of

We study the problem of inverting a deep generative model with ReLU activations. Inversion corresponds to finding a latent code vector that explains observed measurements as much as possible. In most prior works this is performed by attempting to solve a non-convex optimization problem involving the generator. In this paper we obtain several novel theoretical results for the inversion problem. We show that

Senior Manager, Applied Science

Manager, Applied Science

With the advent of conversational assistants, like Amazon Alexa, Google Now, etc., dialogue systems are gaining a lot of traction, especially in industrial setting. These systems typically consist of Spoken Language understanding component which, in turn, consists of two tasks - Intent Classification (IC) and Slot Labeling (SL)...

Once algorithms for quantum-resistant key exchange and digital signature schemes are selected by standards bodies, adoption of post-quantum cryptography will depend on progress in integrating those algorithms into standards for communication protocols and other parts of the IT infrastructure. In this paper, we explore how two major Internet security protocols, the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure

Product search serves as an important entry point for online shopping. In contrast to web search, the retrieved results in product search not only need to be relevant but also should satisfy customers’ preferences in order to elicit purchases. Previous work has shown the efficacy of purchase history in personalized product search [3]. However, customers with little or no purchase history do not benefit

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a successful methodology to optimize black-box functions that are expensive to evaluate. While traditional methods optimize each black-box function in isolation, there has been recent interest in speeding up BO by transferring knowledge across multiple related black-box functions. In this work, we introduce a method to automatically design the BO search space by relying on

BERT model has been successfully applied to open-domain QA tasks. However, previous work trains BERT by viewing passages corresponding to the same question as independent training instances, which may cause incomparable scores for answers from different passages. To tackle this issue, we propose a multi-passage BERT model to globally normalize answer scores across all passages of the same question, and

In product search, users tend to browse results on multiple search result pages (SERPs) (e.g., for queries on clothing and shoes) before deciding which item to purchase. Users’ clicks can be considered as implicit feedback which indicates their preferences and used to re-rank subsequent SERPs...

Senior Manager, Applied Science

Manager, Applied Science